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The founders of socialist movements always intended their system to have this effect ...By Paul G. Kengor on April 13, 2017 at 11:23am

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Editors note: This article first appeared at Stream.org.

Last year, socialism was the most looked-up word at Merriam-Webster.com. That is hardly a surprise. It clearly reflects growing interest, especially with the remarkable surge of lifetime socialist Bernie Sanders, who won a pile of states in pursuing the Democratic Party presidential nomination. He earned over 13 million votes nationwide. Many of those voters have only a hazy idea what socialism entails, but most surely know that it gives the government more control over the so-called means of production as well as your wallet and your property, but not as much as outright Communists crave.

American interest in socialism was growing well before Bernie Sanders. A telling marker came in 2011, when a major study by the Pew Research Center found that 49 percent of Americans aged 18-29 have a positive view of socialism, exceeding those with a positive view of capitalism. What those voters might not realize, but which I know for certain, is that socialism undermines marriage and family: Ive published an entire book on the subject. What I learned from mining the origins of the movement is that this is not an accident: The founders of socialist movements always intended their system to have this effect.

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Most obviously, socialism undermines the family economically. Socialism is ineffective, unproductive, and impoverishing. It creates not economic prosperity but backwardness, and often genuine deprivation (see Venezuela). In that way alone, socialism adversely affects what sources as diverse as Pope Francis and Ronald Reagan have described as the fundamental cell of society: the family.

But surely socialisms founders didnt realize that their system just flat-out didnt work, right? Actually, they believed that it didand in one sense it does: It weakens families for the benefit of the state, exactly as it creators meant it to.

Since at least the early 1800s, when the effort began in earnest, extreme-left radicals have sought to undermine the natural-traditional-Biblical familythe Western Judaeo-Christian model anchored in a man and woman as parents of a household. The steady assault on this timeless model has been a long march that culminated in the chaos of the sexual revolution of the 1960s and in the antics of the nature-redefiners of todays secular left, which employs bullying, state coercion and demonization to forcibly redefine everything from marriage and parenting to biological sex (or as they now call it gender), and whether a child in the womb is even considered a life.

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Marx and Engels in The Communist Manifesto wrote of the abolition of the family, which even in 1848, they could flaunt as an infamous proposal of the communists. What, precisely, they meant by that is a complicated subject. But complexities aside, there is no question that efforts to redefine the family structure have been long at work, from Marx and Engels to sordid figures such as Vladimir Lenin, Leon Trotsky, Alexandra Kollontai, Margaret Sanger, Margaret Mead, Wilhelm Reich, Herbert Marcuse, Betty Friedan, Kate Millet and assorted 60s New Left radicals from Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn to Mark Rudd and Tom Hayden. They included groups ranging from the Bolsheviks to the Frankfurt School of cultural Marxists to the Planned Parenthood eugenics progressives to the Weather Underground and many more.

A glance at this list of dubious characters reveals a mangled mosaic of the wide-ranging left. Among them, the earliest and maybe most revealing of the socialists specificallyat least from a family-focused perspectivewas perhaps Robert Owen.

Owen (1771-1858) was an English utopian-socialist who made his way to American soil. On July 4, 1826, as John Adams and Thomas Jefferson, the geniuses of the Declaration of Independence, both dramatically breathed their last gasps on the 50th anniversary of their eloquent achievement on behalf of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, Robert Owen stood atop his new ideological colony in New Harmony, Indiana and delivered his Declaration of Mental Independence. It is a document you surely didnt read in school, but perhaps you should have, because it foretold the spirit of our modern age. Owen proclaimed:

I now declare to you and to the world that man up to this hour has been in all parts of the earth a slave to a trinity of the most monstrous evils that could be combined to inflict mental and physical evil upon the whole race.

I refer to private property, absurd and irrational systems of religion and marriage founded upon individual property, combined with some of these irrational systems of religion.

There it was: property, religion, marriage. This was Robert Owens unholy trinity.

Owens acolytes began their new civilization by scrapping the Christian Anno Domini calendar, marking 1826 as their new Year One. He was imitating the Jacobins, who had likewise reset the calendar in 1794 amid their bloodcurdling de-Christianization of France. (Mussolini and Pol Pot would later follow suit.) Owen established what the 1960s hippies would call communes. Owens socialist communes pooled not only profits but people, replacing the nuclear family with the collective family. His socialism was cultural as well as economic, as socialism and its enthusiasts always would be.

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The New Harmony colony floundered within just two years, with Owen curiously absent from his creation for sustained periods, thus setting the standard for future leftist-utopian chieftains: They rarely live according to the rules and systems they create for others. Socialism and communism have always been for the people, the masses, the ruled, but rarely for the rulers. Castro, Stalin, Pol Pot, Maogiven the choice, they never lived the same way with the same rules and equal salaries as the serfs. Indeed, how could they? Their socialist-communist cocoons were always intolerable because they were bankrupt and unnatural. No one chooses that misery.

But the unnatural is what so many leftist utopians pursued then and in the years and centuries ahead. Even as Robert Owens New Harmony commune quickly collapsed, a dozen or so imitators sprangup around the country. Rarely did any of them last more than four years. Owens leftist vision remained alive and undeterred. The social system is now firmly established, he asserted.

An uphill stream of Owen-like dreamers on the left would keep the flame alive, from the 1820s to the 1960s in their own communes, and into the 21st century with their own versions of marriage and family. Never learning from failed projects of the past, they would always convince themselves that the previous project simply wasnt done quite rightnot yet. When they implemented their commune, their utopia, their more enlightened and modern view of marriage and the family, it would surely work this time around. Such is the socialist faith.

Charles Fourier (1772-1837) was another merry socialist who reviled property, marriage, and religion. He dreamed of collectivizing the masses in communes where they could undergo fundamental transformation. (He also believed that human efforts would someday turn the seas to tasty lemonade.) A forerunner to 1960s New Left radicals on American college campuses, Fourier openly advocated the abolition of monogamous marriage, and championed polyamory, homosexuality, and other forms of what Margaret Sanger and the 1920s American progressives would celebrate as free love. Fouriers lead disciple in America, Albert Brisbane, practiced what his master taught, proving himself exceptionally progressive by maintaining several mistresses and fathering three illegitimate children.

Predictably, the Fourier-Brisbane communes would work about as well as Owens ideological colonies, and the ones that followed. There were probably forty some such communes that sprung up around the country in this period, and quickly dissolved. No matter, leftists never give up. All they need is more power than the previous group of ideological colonists, and then theyll get it right the next time. It is the governing spirit of their ideology. Just wait for their better, more enlightened ideas on marriage, family, sexuality, gender, and on and on. Forward!

On the heels of Fourier came John Humphrey Noyes and his Oneida colony and their newfangled designs for the family, which included group marriages that shared both intimacy and children.

All of these nature-redefiners plowed new ground for new versions of the family according to each of their ideological conceptions. To borrow from Pope Francis, they were engaged in ideological colonizations. Each new generation came up with its own socialist colonies, all the way to the Red Family Colony in Berkeley in the 1960s established by Tom Hayden and Robert Scheer. The 60s New Left also launched its glorious smash monogamy movement, which was an exciting form of marriage that would be (and had to be, they insisted) non-monogamous.

In short, these were the bold ancestors of todays same-sex marriage movement and LGBTQ sex-gender redefiners. They all shared in common, then and today, the rejection of any notion that there is a single natural, traditional and Biblical model for the family.

It is not possible to speak of the family, insisted Friedrich Engels. Indeed, just ask the broad range of leftists in the current-day organization Beyond Marriage. They agree wholeheartedly with Engels on that one.

The views expressed in this opinion article are solely those of their author and are not necessarily either shared or endorsed by the owners of this website.

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Joyce Carol Oates Think Again Podcast #93 Oh, That's Socialism

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Since 2008, Big Think has been sharing big ideas from creative and curious minds. The Think Again podcast takes us out of our comfort zone, surprising our guests and Jason Gots, your host, with unexpected conversation starters from Big Thinks interview archives.

The writerJoyce Carol Oates grew up on a farm, tending chickens in what she describes as a very desolate part of upstate New York, and grew up to write around 90 (and counting) novels and collections of essays and short stories, many of them while teaching at Princeton University. Shes won many, many awards, including the National Book Award, the Pen/Malamud Award and the National Humanities Medal. Her powerful new novel, A Book of American Martyrs, begins with a terrible act of violence and then deals with its complex aftermath.

Today's conversation starts there, weaving through the political and religious landscape of America, past and present. We also talk about whether writing, for Joyce, is as "effortless" as as critics have described the experience of reading her. Trump comes, up, inevitably but briefly, as do Jonathan Safran Foer, Lord Byron, and the problems early success can pose.

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Gish Jen on Identity and Choice in the West, Nicole Mason on Poverty in America

About Think Again - A Big Think Podcast:You've got 10 minutes with Einstein. What do you talk about? Black holes? Time travel? Why not gambling?The Art of War? Contemporary parenting? Some of the best conversations happen when we're pushed outside of our comfort zones. Each week on Think Again, we surprise smart people you may have heard of with short clips from Big Think's interview archives on every imaginable subject. These conversations could, and do, go anywhere.

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Joyce Carol Oates Think Again Podcast #93 Oh, That's Socialism - Big Think

WHEREVER THERE has been a socialist or radical movement, there has been a newspaper to help spreads its ideas and build the cause.

When the likes of Eugene Debs, Elizabeth Gurley Flynn and Big Bill Haywood sought to build an audience for socialism and workers' organization at the beginning of the 19th century, they found their audience through the Socialist Party's Appeal to Reason, the IWW's Industrial Worker or another of the dozens of radical, multi-language publications of the day.

When Minneapolis truck drivers went out on strike for a union in 1934, they had their own newspaper to counter the bosses' lies about the strike and to knit together solidarity for their side. The Organizer became the first daily strike newspaper produced in the U.S.

When soldiers protested the war in Vietnam, they built up their resistance with GI newspapers. Some 300 underground newspapers, such as Fed Up and G.I. Voice, were produced and circulated during the course of the war to spread a message of dissent, even though it could mean severe disciplinary actions against active-duty soldiers.

The Black Panther Party for Self-Defense put its weekly newspaper at the center of its organizing, using it to provide a voice for the Black Power struggle and to organize members around a set of revolutionary politics. At its high point, the Black Panther had a weekly circulation of a quarter of a million copies.

Even in the Internet age, activists in the Occupy movement in 2011 turned to newspapers to send their message against the greed of the 1 Percent. With names like the Occupied Wall Street Journal and Occupied Chicago Tribune, these papers reflected the ideas and debates in the movement.

The importance of a media for our side is clear. The New York Times or the Washington Post may claim that they provide the facts without bias, but it's clear that they actually do take sides--and it's not the side of the workers.

This doesn't mean there's nothing of interest in the mainstream press. They sometimes reflect the changing opinions in the world around them.

For instance, in 2001, when the death penalty was being discredited by a growing list of death row prisoners who were found innocent, the Republican Chicago Tribune ran articles supporting a moratorium and even abolition. Protest and public outcry over the scandalous facts about the death penalty changed many opinions, even those of the conservative Tribune.

But by and large, mainstream newspapers don't venture far from their main job of defending the status quo--the police in instances of police brutality, management in times of strike, and the U.S. government when it declares war.

That's why we need to have a voice for our side. Former Black Panther David Hilliard explained what that meant:

We knew from the beginning how critical it was to have our own publication, to set forth our own agenda for freedom, to raise political consciousness among our people as to their oppressed state, to rebut government lies, to tell the truth, to urge change, to use the pen alongside the sword.

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FOR SOCIALISTS and their organizations, the revolutionary newspaper plays a key role not just in circulating reports and commentary to further struggles for justice that can't be found in the mainstream media, but also in contributing to building organizations that can challenge the system as a whole.

Throughout the history of the socialist movement, revolutionaries have produced and written for newspapers with the aim of finding an audience of people who can be won to socialist ideas and who see themselves part of building socialist organization.

Neue Rheinische Zeitung was the paper of Karl Marx, Frederick Engels and the German revolutionary movement of 1848. Die Rote Fahne was the paper of Rosa Luxemburg, Karl Liebknecht and the German Revolution of 1918. Iskra and other papers provided Lenin and the Russian revolutionaries with a platform in the years before the 1917 revolution. These are just a few of the examples.

Writing about the role of the revolutionary newspaper, Italian socialist and editor of L'Ordine Nuovo Antonio Gramsci explained how the act of a worker choosing a socialist paper is a step toward recognizing the real role of the bourgeois press:

[E]very day, this same worker is able to personally see that the bourgeois newspapers tell even the simplest of facts in a way that favors the bourgeois class and damns the working class and its politics.

Has a strike broken out? The workers are always wrong as far as the bourgeois newspapers are concerned. Is there a demonstration? The demonstrators are always wrong, solely because they are workers they are always hotheads, rioters, hoodlums. The government passes a law? It's always good, useful and just, even if it's...not. And if there's an electoral, political or administrative struggle? The best programs and candidates are always those of the bourgeois parties.

The act of reporting on the struggles of workers and the oppressed and drawing socialist conclusions is just as "political" as an editorial. In fact, for a socialist paper, there's a premium on drawing out the lessons of a struggle and sharing it with a wider audience of fellow activists.

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IN SOCIALIST Worker's 40 years of publishing, it has told many of these stories of workers' fights. From the start, the pages of SW were filled with reporting from picket lines, like coal miners' strike against the Taft-Harley Act in 1977-78. This was the last era before the employers' offensive really revved up.

But even when the class struggle receded, SW continued to report on labor issues, with an attention to the rank-and-file activists behind them. For example, our coverage of the bitter "War Zone" struggles in Decatur, Illinois, in the mid-1990s gave a voice to the workers who were leading that fight, telling the story of the obstacles they faced and the strategies they used, their conflict with their International union, and how they organized co-workers inside the plant.

When SW reported on the Wisconsin uprising against Republican Gov. Scott Walker's assault on public-sector workers in 2011, it told the story of the spirited and creative organizing inside the Capitol occupation that kept it going for weeks--but also the betrayal of the Democrats that ended it.

In this way, Socialist Worker reported the facts about struggles that couldn't be found elsewhere, but it also drew out the lessons of each fight to share with others fighting for changes.

Writing about the revolutionary paper, the Russian revolutionary Lenin talked about the importance of "exposures"--articles exposing the crimes of capitalism. In the hands of bourgeois newspapers, these stories often mean very little beyond the stated facts, but when reported on in the socialist press, they can become powerful condemnations of the system we live under.

When it was revealed that dozens of Black children were being murdered in the city of Atlanta in the early 1980s, SW carried a special feature that gave expression to the horror and fear felt by Black families in that city, but also revealed the negligence of city officials and the systematic racism that underpinned it all.

When Hurricane Katrina devastated New Orleans in 2005, our writers reported on the storm's impact, but also told the untold stories of survivors who came to each others' aid and exposed the roots of the manmade disaster that followed the storm.

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INSTEAD OF standing removed from the struggles, the revolutionary press's job is to help make those struggles stronger and ultimately to help others reach socialist conclusions. Writing on the importance of the paper taking up theoretical questions, Lenin explained:

It is necessary to combine all the concrete facts and manifestations of the working-class movement with the indicated questions; the light of theory must be cast upon every separate fact; propaganda on questions of politics and party organization must be carried on among the broad masses of the working class; and these questions must be dealt with in the work of agitation.

So when there are debates about the way forward in a struggle, SW want to be part of the discussion.

When pro-Palestinian activists come under attack, SW proposes ways and strategies to defend them. When the right wing tries to spread its racist ideas on college campuses, SW analyzes the best way to confront and defeat them. When both the right and the left are calling for protectionist trade measures, SW offers an argument to make the international working-class movement stronger.

Those debates, of course, extend beyond the confines of activist struggle to how socialists look at the world. So an article in SW about those on the left who support voting for a Democrat may take up the problems with individual candidates, but it also further--to talk about the role of the Democratic Party itself in weakening struggles for justice.

With the collapse of the Stalinist regimes of Eastern Europe in 1989, demoralization hit some on the left when regimes they had long considered "socialist" were overthrown. Likewise, for the right, this was a sign that "socialism was dead."

But for Socialist Worker and the ISO, this wave of revolt was a sign that the rebuilding of the socialist tradition--socialist from below, not Stalinism--was possible. Our headline was: "The old order crumbles."

In September 2001, activists were preparing for what looked to be the biggest protests of the anti-globalization movement yet coming at the end of the month. The terrorist attacks on September 11 changed all that, as much of burgeoning movement went into disarray. The ISO's response was to stand by our anti-imperialist principles and challenge the chorus of people in favor of the "war on terror."

Amid the hysteria, racism and saber-rattling, we made an argument against the war with the hope of reaching a wider audience: "Don't turn tragedy into war." This uncompromising but sober slogan helped set the tone for the argument that socialists would have to make as we faced a tide of nationalism and Islamophobia.

This shows how socialist organizations and their newspapers are constantly looking at their audience, the world around us and the prospects for taking movement a step in the direction of solidarity and self-activity.

Using the revolutionary newspaper, socialists can challenge the rotten ideas that weaken the working-class struggle, like racism, sexism, Islamophobia and anti-LGBTQ, or support for wars and laws that only benefit our rulers. We need to make the patient arguments to people who may not have heard them before.

But when the struggle is on the rise, our media can provide the information and ideas that can help growing movements forge ahead.

Ultimately, we want convince people why a completely different society--socialism--is not only a better idea, but one worth organizing for. The paper plays a role in training a new layer of socialists in our politics and traditions--and in how to take those politics to the rest on the world.

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A voice for socialism for 40 years - Socialist Worker Online

In an attempt to achieve a just society in which the government and economy serves the people, Madisons chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America met to distinguish the goals betweencapitalism and socialism and the need to spurasocialist movement.

The head of the chapter, Marc Silberman, kicked off the Wednesday meeting by differentiating between capitalism and socialism.

Socialism in its ideal state is defined as a system that believes in one person, one voice, one vote, and seeks to eliminate the role of private money in politics, Silberman said. Capitalism, on the other hand, is a social and economic system based on the buying and selling of commodities motivated by profits.

Socialist activist urges society to rethink, resist imperialismIn an attempt to promotesocialists imperialistic resistance in the U.S., the University of Wisconsin chapter of the International Socialist Organization Read

Silberman said capitalism is an economic system that creates enormous wealth for few and terrible hardships and toil for many.

Capitalism is a system of oppression and exploitation to the worker, Silberman said. This is due to the fact thatworkers produce more than what they are paid, he added.

In addition to not getting paid enough, workers also dont have any say as to how or what they produce or how surplus is distributed, Silberman said.

The goal of socialism then is to rescue political democracy by eliminating most economic inequality and to democratize the institution to work for and by the people,Tony Schmitt,chair of the DSAs Madison chapter, said.

Schmitt saidthe democratic socialists aspire for the economy to be under social control and also urged for a need to alter the economic driving force reflect the satisfaction of human needs.

Resistance wont end with International Womens Day: Panelists encourage student, political activismAs part of ongoing celebrations of International Womens Day, University of Wisconsin students and members of the Madison community gathered Read

In asocialist society, the power of money will be replaced by the power of democratic numbers,Kai Fraiser Van, one of the members of the chapter, said.

There will be a dramatic reshape in our government [in the socialist society], as it will serve the needs of our working people, and at its core will be the inclusion and freedom of each person, Fraiser Van said.

The organization also addressed common misconceptions of socialism, clarifying it is not interested in collectivizing private property since it does not give citizens power over others.

They also dispelled the notion that socialism seeks to eliminate individual freedom. Instead, members said it aims to allow individuals to nurture their individual capacities.

By rebuilding the socialist movement, it can eventually become a major socialist political party that can limit the rights of capitalism and enhance workers rights, Frasier Vansaid.

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Democratic Socialists of America look to dispel myths around socialism, urge need to rethink capitalism - The Badger Herald

Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders holds a campaign rally in San Diego, California. (Photo: Mike Blake/Reuters)

Im tempted to say that statism is sort of like a cult. Proponents of socialism and other big-government ideologies have a dogmatic zeal that blinds them to reality.

For instance, no nation has ever become rich with big government. But that doesnt stop leftists from advocating in favor of higher taxes and more coercive redistribution.

They are equally capable of rationalizing that economic misery in places such as Greece and Venezuela has nothing to do with bad policy, and you can even find a few zealots willing to defend basket cases such as Cuba and North Korea.

So long as they dont burn me at the stake for my heretical views, I guess I wont get too agitated by their bizarre fetish for statism.

But I will periodically mock them. And thats the purpose of todays column. Well start with this nice comparison between a capitalist grocery store and a socialist grocery store. I have no idea, by the way, if the lower image actually is a supermarket in a socialist country, but lets not forget that a real-world version of this comparison is one of the reasons theres no longer an Evil Empire.

But the bad news about socialism is not limited to economic deprivation for the masses.

The system also leads in many cases to totalitarianism (see this article by Marian Tupy, for example).

Venezuela is a particularly poignant example. Once the richest nation in Latin America, it now is an economic laggard and also is a cesspool of oppression.

Which makes this set of images from Reddits libertarian page both funny and sad.

As you might expect, Milton Friedman had some very pointed observations on this topic.

The really good part starts shortly before 2:00. He explains very clearly that socialism is based on force and coercion.

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Laughing at Socialism, Both in Theory and Practice | People's Pundit ... - People's Pundit Daily